The comedy "An Adult Evening of Shel Silverstein" is a collection of sketches adapted for the stage from the writings of Chicago-born Silverstein, first produced by the Atlantic Theater Company of New York in 2001, running for the next two weekends in the Teatro Luna Cabaret Studio. It's directed by Alex Hughes for Devil's Thumb Productions, a new-to-Chicago company from Boulder, Colo., founded in 2010 by University of Colorado grads.

The production pares the usual 10 sketches of this show to eight and adds songs in between. An example: Company member Laura Kruegel says in her favorite sketch she is a girl getting a strange birthday present from her father.

"You see this big lump onstage," she says. "Turns out it's a dead pony."

In another, she's a wife role-playing with her husband in bed. Her suggestion takes place in a lifeboat; she wants her husband to throw her mother-in-law overboard.

Gentle, they are not.

The late Silverstein was a prolific guy, and not everything he wrote was for kids. (He wrote Johnny Cash's hit song "A Boy Named Sue," and in 1957 he did a series of travel-journal cartoons for Playboy magazine).

On the other hand, Kruegel says, parents who have gone back to his children's books, like "Where the Sidewalk Ends" (1974), know that his poems were not all that gentle, either. (Spoiler alert: Sylvia Stout dies in that mountain of garbage.)

"It's not a stretch at all, really," Kruegel says. "It's more of a step than a leap from those poems to what we're doing onstage."